Ex-aide contradicts Cicilline on brother's check

In interviews, the mayor is disputing Bizzacco's account. Here's how Malinowski describes it:

This afternoon, Cicilline met with a reporter in his City Hall office and vehemently denied Bizzacco's recollection of the meeting. He said the he would have remembered with "great clarity" a discussion of a bad check for $75,000 involving his brother.

"My head would have exploded," Cicilline said. "I would have been so angry."

PROVIDENCE -- A former top aide to Mayor David N. Cicilline told a state police detective that he briefed his boss on the circumstances surrounding a bad check for $75,000 that Cicilline's brother, John M. Cicilline, wrote on behalf of a delinquent taxpayer more than two years ago.

The aide, Chris Bizzacco, Cicilline's ex-chief of staff, provided the explosive admission in a formal statement to State Police Detective John Lemont. The statement is included in a court affidavit filed Monday in District Court, and it clearly contradicts what Cicilline told The Providence Journal in September when he said he first learned of the bad check.

"I had just learned about it and was distressed and he assured me that there was nothing there," Cicilline said at the time of his brother. "I accepted that because I am the mayor and he is my brother that this required a review so that someone could objectively look at it."

In the nine-page affidavit, Bizzacco said he recalled John Simmons, the mayor's former director of administration, approaching him in October 2006 to discuss the bad check. At the time, Bizzacco said that he believes Simmons was about to assume a new post in the administration as finance director.

Bizzacco said that he remembered bringing Simmons into Cicilline's office and telling the mayor about his brother not having enough money in his checking account to cover the $75,000 check.

Bizzacco told the detective that Cicilline did not give him any specific directions other than, "see what you can do to resolve it."